2013: My Year in Writing
(Note: unless you're a pal, or deeply interested in the minutae of my publishing path, this post might bore you a lot. Consider not reading any further...)
Last January, I dubbed 2013 my Year of Getting S#!t Published. Now this year is almost done. How did I do? Well…
Let me complicate things immediately by noting that I write under two names, my own, and a pen name for my romances.
For anyone paying attention, romance is pretty popular with the ebook crowd. So I've been writing a lot, hoping to make a real living from it. In 2013, I wrote and published 3 novellas and a novel under my pen name. I was aiming to get something out every three months, and I more or less stuck to that schedule. This output represented a massive proportion of my overall writing, in terms of time and attention.
The good news is that my work has been fairly successful so far. I've gotten mostly positive reviews, and sales are quite decent (my publishing company is in the black!). I'm still far from being able to live off this income, but I went into this knowing that it would not offer insta-riches, and in the meantime it's a lot of fun.
Under my own name, things have been quieter, in large part because so much of my writing energy has gone toward the romances. My 2013 goals for my other writings were focused largely on short stories.
I published a collection of fairytales with my company Hammer & Birch, which I'm immensely pleased with…and which sells dismally. Initial marketing efforts went pretty much nowhere, and things are on a back burner until I either think of something new to do, or until I publish another title that the existing ones can piggyback on. Happily, as ebooks, all the fairytales have infinite shelf life, so they're available and don't have to go out of print.
In an effort to build street cred (and pub creds), I also aimed to complete and submit to magazines as many short stories as I could. In 2013, I've submitted 15 stories to over 25 different markets. Of those, I got 8 published thus far.
Message in a Bottle, in the April issue of Crossed Genres
The Rampion is Extra, in the September issue of Modern Day Fairytales
Coach Class, in the October issue of The Grimm Report
Marchenstrasse Pets, October, The Grimm Report
Newest Apple Event , November, The Grimm Report
Wonderland Deploys Task Force to Address Rabbit Holes November, The Grimm Report
Golem Shows the True Meaning of Christmas, December, The Grimm Report
Occupy Christmas, December, The Grimm Report
You’ll notice a trend at the end of that list. The folks at the Grimm Report have been super receptive to my style of crazy—the format of fairy tales plus snarky journalism is just perfect. I was lucky to also be included in their shiny ebook Our Brothers Grimmest.
Whether flash or not, eight stories are far more than zero stories, which is how many I got published in 2012. True, only one was for professional-rate pay. The others (all the flash fiction) were for non-paying markets that confer "only" a publishing credit, potential recognition, and potential professional contacts…which are all things I want to have.
I'm proud to have appeared in each one of these markets, and I've have great experiences working with the editors of each. The goal of appearing in pro-rate markets was arbitrary, and based mostly on the fact that if I was going to stack up rejection letters, then by god, they were going to be stylish, well-heeled, fancy-schmancy rejection letters. In other words, the sting is slightly lessened when you get rejected by the “best". Though it's still better to get acceptance notices. Finally, my published work also resulted in one literary agent cold-calling me to ask if I was interested in representation. That whole thing didn't gel, but it was very nice to get the first email.
One other thing I started to do in 2013 was to explore in-between-ish publishing platforms like Wattpad. I put up one of my fairytales as a sample, and I've also been posting a chapter per week from a YA fantasy that I'm currently working on, titled Into The Greenwood. Wattpad is free to use, so this is not a money-making venture (at least not directly). If one defines success on Wattpad as gathering reads, votes, and followers, then my success has been very modest so far. But I intend to keep using it at least until my YA book is complete, and then we'll see how things go.
So, to tally up. In 2013, I published:
3 romance novellas (20,000 words each, for 60,000 words)
1 romance novel (95,000 words)
1 story collection (50,000 words)
8 short stories/flash pieces in various online magazines (5000 words)
1/2 of a fantasy novel draft (50,000 words so far…)
That's 13.5 discrete thingies, and about 260,000 words. That's a publication every month. And that's just what saw the light of internet day! I have even more words waiting in the darkness. I hereby declare 2013 a success. You're next, 2014, you sly sidereal vixen.